[Commlist] call for chapter proposals :Beyond the Council Estate: Cinematic Space(s) of the Working-Class.

*Beyond the Council Estate: Cinematic Space(s) of the Working-Class.*

*CALL for SUBMISSIONS*

*Edited by: Katerina Flint-Nicol and Deirdre O’Neill*

In British film, if ‘the image of the tower block silhouetted against 
the sky has become part of the basic vocabulary of British cinema, most 
often invoked as a visual signifier for the marginalised and menacing’ 
(Burke, 2007: 177), then predominately the ‘marginalised and menacing’ 
alluded to are the working-class. While the concept of class as an 
analytical framework in cultural and political discourse has been in 
crisis, representations of class across British film persist. From the 
1935 British documentary, /Housing Problems, /to/Rita, Sue and Bob Too/ 
(Alan Clarke, 1987), /Attack the Block/ (Joe Cornish, 2011), /The 
Selfish Giant/ (Clio Barnard, 2013), and the recent horror film /His 
House/ (Remi Weekes 2020), both fictional and non-fiction screen 
narratives of the British working-class have developed to be synonymous 
with the setting of the council estate. As visual shorthand, the council 
estate has become a dominant signifier of poverty, criminality and 
deviance functioning to stigmatise the working class and obscure the 
structural determinants responsible for impoverishment.

Repeated constructions across audio visual mediums and screen genres 
reproduce and naturalise stereotypical and publicly imagined class 
identities, speaking more to political and media discourse (Tyler, 2013) 
whilst disrupting concepts of, and commitments to, authenticity and 
‘making visible’ of working-class lives (Higson, 1986; Hill, 1986 & 
2000); filmmaking objectives long associated with the British tradition 
of social realism. As a signifying practice and ‘normative spatial 
context’ (Edensar, 2015: 62), the council estate may have developed to 
be a key site for characterisation and narrative trajectory, aiding in 
the synergy between space, place, and identity (Hallam and Marshment, 
2002). But as an ideological conductor (Burke, 2007) it also serves to 
confine the working-class as immobile, in decline, and ‘local’, 
explicitly contrasted to the neoliberal idea of self-managed mobility in 
an age of expansive globalisation. In essence, a ‘global other’.

Working-class space then is both conceptual and physical, functioning to 
demarcate the cultural and social boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’ 
whilst justifying the stigmatisation of those who live on council 
estates by reference to the culture of the working class and situating 
them within political discourses that construct them as a dangerous 
underclass. This discourse of dangerous underclass is often racialised 
within a white centric media through tropes of immigration, black 
criminality, racist socio-political discourses and ‘geographical 
specificity’ (Malik, S and Nwonka C,J., 2017 )

But what other spaces do the working-class in British film inhabit and 
occupy? What spaces are they excluded from and what can we learn from 
their absence from certain spaces? To what extent have working-class 
spaces been colonised and what does the refiguring of such geographies 
into middle class spaces (gentrification) tell us about the way in which 
we understand space as socially produced?Can this dialectical play 
between absence and presence lead us to rethink the representation of 
class in British cinema by looking beyond the council estate?

 >From the anti-pastoral of the new British rural film as exemplified 
by /The Goob/ (Guy Myhill, 2014) and /Catch Me Daddy/ (Daniel Wolfe, 
2014) to the liminal space of the seaside of /Bhaji on the Beach/ 
(Gurinder Chadha, 1993) and /Make-Up/ (Claire Oakley, 2019), films can 
function as sites of resistance to hegemonic perceptions and experiences 
of class, where spaces beyond that of the domestic and council estate 
and of the social realist filmmaking practice, enables transgression 
across boundaries of sexuality, gender and class (Wayne, 2006) and for 
different class stories to be told.

Addressing historical and contemporary representations, the objective of 
this edited collection is to rethink the British working-class onscreen 
and seeks a diverse range of perspectives and theoretical interventions 
for chapters on the cinematic spaces of the working class. Topics could 
include, but are not limited to:

  * Class identities beyond social realism
  * Colonisation of working-class space
  * Class, space, and the absence of the working class
  * Race, class, and gentrification
  * Conceptual spaces
  * Transgressive space and identities
  * Sites of resistance
  * Class and activism
  * Tensions in classed geographies between public and private space
  * Gendered space
  * Architecture, identity, and film form
  * Class, space, and nostalgia
  * Space and historical shifts in class condition
  * Space, film policy and regional filmmaking
  * Class and sound
  * Age, class, and space
  * Council estates and territorial stigmatization

Please submit abstracts (maximum 350 words) and bios (maximum 150 words) 
and any enquiries you may have to, Katerina Flint-Nicol 
((k.flint-nicol /at/ qub.ac.uk) <mailto:(k.flint-nicol /at/ qub.ac.uk)>) and Deirdre 
O’Neill ((d.oneill3 /at/ herts.ac.uk) <mailto:(d.oneill3 /at/ herts.ac.uk)>)..

*Deadline for chapter proposals: 30^th September 2022. *

*Notification of acceptance: November 11^th : 2022*

*Deadline for the submission of chapters: April 2023.*

**

**

*/Work Cited/*

Burke, Andrew. (2007) ‘Concrete universality: Tower blocks, 
architectural modernism, and realism in contemporary British cinema’, 
/New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film/, 5 (3): 177-188.

Edensar, Tim. (2015) ‘Sensing National Spaces: Representing the Mundane 
in English Film and Television’ in /European Cinema and Television 
Cultural Policy and Everyday Life/ (eds.) I.Bondeberg, E. Novrup 
Redvall, & A. Higson, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 58-80.

Hallam, Julia and Margaret Marshment, eds (2000) /Realism and popular 
cinema/, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Higson, Andrew. (1986) ‘Britain’s outstanding contribution to the film: 
the documentary-realist tradition’, in Barr, C. ed. /All Our Yesterdays: 
90 Years of British Cinema/, London: BFI: 72-97.

Hill, John. (1986) /Sex, Class and realism: British cinema 1956-1963/, 
London: BFI.

Hill, John. (2000) ‘From The New Wave to ‘Brit-Grit’. Continuity and 
difference in working-class realism’ in Ashby and Higson, eds. /British 
Cinema: Past and Present/, London: Routledge: 249-60.

Hill, John. (2000) ‘Failure and Utopianism: Representations of the 
Working Class in British Cinema of the 1990s’ in Murphy, Robert (ed), 
/British Cinema of the 90s/, London: BFI Publishing: 178-87.

Malik, S and Nwonka C, J. (2017) ‘/Top Boy/: Cultural Verisimilitude and 
the Allure of Black Criminality for UK Public Service Broadcasting Drama 
in ‘/Journal of British Cinema and Television/ 14:4, 423-444

Wayne, Mike. (2006) ‘Working Title Mark II: A Critique of the 
Atlanticist Paradigm for British Cinema’. /International Journal of 
Media & Cultural Politics/. 2006, Vol. 2 Issue 1, 59-73.


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